Maybe Diana Krall has been stung by years of accusations that she is just a dinner-jazzer with a nice voice. Maybe her private and professional partnership with Elvis Costello has helped release her from the role of sublimely classy covers artist. Or maybe she has simply learned how to have a good time in public.
However it's happened, the formerly oblique singer/pianist has changed the message. On the first of her UK gigs, she sounded like she had been listening to Count Basie and Tom Waits rather than Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra or Antonio Carlos Jobim - the soft-lights influences that have shaped much of her recorded work.
She began with a hard-swinging instrumental, and kept something of the same punchy emphasis for a triumphant account of All or Nothing at All, which in earlier years she had sung wistfully. Krall's piano-playing is usually overshadowed by her laconically subtle singing, but here she shared the solo space equally with her powerful guitarist Anthony Wilson. And, though good ideas sometimes break down unfinished in Krall's solos, her understated melodies and Ahmad Jamal's exultant chordwork made her playing much more of a fulcrum of the show than many of her albums would ever indicate.
A Mose Allison tribute added a bluesy drive, Krall bringing her confiding voice to the edge of a soulful shout. The title track of her most recent album, The Girl in the Other Room (co-written with Costello), emphasised her new resources of material and Peter Erskine's remarkably detailed, sympathetic drumming.
Erskine won some of the warmest applause of the night for his razor-sharp solo on a fast Devil May Care, and Robert Hurst's softly loping bassline and Krall's delayed vocal accents revitalised East of the Sun. Krall's caressing of fine nuances and retreats to almost inaudible sounds made a triumph of Costello's Almost Blue, while the best lyrics of the night came in the same writer's Departure Bay, part of a hypnotic unaccompanied medley as an encore.
Acknowledging last week's political news, Krall had preceded it with a slow Let's Face the Music and Dance. The line "There may be trouble ahead" brought an ironic cheer from the crowd.
· At Birmingham Academy tonight. Box office: 0870 909 4144. Then touring.
